One of the closest friends I made when I moved to Washington was Eli Lake, national-security reporter for UPI and later the now-defunct New York Sun. I’m a liberal, Eli’s a neoconservative, and both of us like to argue, preferably when we’re not sober. As you can imagine with two friends who view things differently and believe in what they’re saying, it would occasionally get heated, but, you know, like Avon said to D’Angelo, it was always love. Earlier this year — much like with Avon and D’Angelo — we had a pretty acrimonious falling-out, with each of us accusing the other of professional bad faith and personal unpleasantness.

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve taken some steps to squash this. Politics is important. But so is friendship, and to take that a step further, you should want to have friends who disagree with you, and sometimes disagree with you deeply. Check each other’s excesses, fill each other’s blindspots, strengthen your own arguments and then light the peace pipe and make Steely Dan references. It’s a better way to live.

Today Bloggingheads put up a special reconciliation episode with the two of us. We played down the personal shit that I just wrote about and mostly talked about Iraq, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, Obama and all the stuff you’d expect. But this was personally meaningful to me, even though I maintain Eli looks like the helmetless Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi. Get some sun, playboy!